Bringing Wellness Full Circle

Posts tagged ‘Coaching’

I am passionate about life coaching because of the amazing results I get to see with my own eyes.

Life coaching is mushrooming all over the world these days, but it really is not a new concept at all. The practice of coaching certainly has its roots in sports. There were soccer coaches, baseball and basketball coaches long before any other kind of coaches. Then we saw some athletic coaches for individuals, moving from a group setting to a personal setting. Timothy Gallwey wrote a very insightful book in 1974,The Inner Game of Tennis, in which he showed a new approach to personal performance, shifting the focus r hysical action to the mental mindset of the athlete–when the tennis players were taught how to become “self-aware,: they performed a lot better than when they were simply taught how to hit the ball. And this is the process of life coaching. All other life coaching stems from this: executive, business, health, career, wellness, etc…

There a re a few principles that life coaches have come to believe in and adhere to:

~people must take responsibility and be accountable

~our lives are very much shaped by our interactions with others. Dr. William Mayer, a US Army psychiatrist who studied 1,000 American prisoners of war who had been detained in a North Korean camp, discovered a 38 percent overall death rate – the highest POW death rate in U.S. history. Even more astounding was that half of these soldiers died simply because they had given up. Why? Because of the extreme mental tactics that their captors used: deny men the emotional support that comes from interpersonal relationships.

~it is good to study and emphasize what is good with people rather than only what is wrong with them. This is the field of positive psychology, which roots go back to at least 1962, when psychologist Abraham Maslow wrote about what a human life could be in his book ‘Toward a Psychology of Being’. Maslow differed from traditional psychologists by studying happy, high-performing people to learn more about what they had in common.

Like this:

And it’s true in basketball of course, but also in all of health. In all of life.

Because if your head is thinking about Twizzlers, that is where your hands and your mouth are going to go. And if your head is heading to the gym, that is where your legs are going to follow. And if your head is going to the potato chips and couch and gallons of ice cream, well, that is certainly where your body is going to go.